Advanced Bionics

There's glamour enough for everybody these days--even designers of medical devices. Five Southern California companies were winners in the first nationwide contest earlier this month to award designs that enhance health care and save costs. Morphix Design in Newport Beach and Hartwell Medical Corp. in Carlsbad were co-winners for a device used to safely transplant patients in an emergency from the scene of trauma to the hospital.

With his gift of $100 million to USC--and the promise of another $100 million for UCLA--Los Angeles businessman Alfred E. Mann has secured a spot among the likes of Ted Turner and Bill Gates for entrepreneurial generosity. The difference, of course, is that the media mogul and the high-tech wizard are household names, while Mann remains a virtual unknown in his own backyard.

After a closed-door meeting between Los Angeles City Councilman Alex Padilla and biotech mogul Alfred Mann, the councilman said Friday he is prepared to support plans to use surplus city land in Sylmar to house a cancer drug research and manufacturing facility. Padilla said his support was contingent on Mann agreeing to address three issues, which Mann told The Times would be no problem.

Changing course after their controversial retail development plan fizzled in September, CSUN officials said Friday they now hope to turn the North Campus property into an office and research park for biotechnical and biomedical companies and entertainment production facilities. A third of the 65-acre parcel will be preserved for athletic facilities and the University Village housing complex, said Cal State Northridge President Blenda Wilson.

Objecting that the city may be getting the short end of the stick, Councilman Alex Padilla on Wednesday criticized a redevelopment proposal for a former landfill in the northeast Valley and asked the city Planning Commission to block the deal. The controversy centers on a 14-acre plot, part of the old Branford landfill and a former gravel mine, that city officials hope to resurrect as an industrial park for high-tech companies.

A little above his left elbow, cyberneticist Kevin Warwick bears a quarter-inch scar, the vestige of an experiment this year in which he had an electronic transmitter implanted just beneath his skin. For eight days, Warwick meandered through a sensor-rich building at Britain's University of Reading, his movements tracked by a Big Brother-ish computer that would open doors for him, turn on his personal computer, check his e-mail and greet him with a cheery "Hello, professor Warwick."

A Santa Monica-based biomedical firm, Specialty Laboratories Inc., will build a new headquarters in Valencia in one of two major real estate developments announced last week by the Newhall Land & Farming Co. Specialty, which provides laboratory testing services for hospitals and clinics, said it will build a three-story 200,000-square-foot combination laboratory and administrative building on a 13.8-acre site that the company acquired from Newhall Land.

Moving its aggressive acquisition campaign into the field of diabetes management, Medtronic Inc., the world's biggest medical device maker, agreed to buy Northridge-based MiniMed Inc. and an affiliated company for $3.7 billion, the companies said Wednesday. As part of the deal, MiniMed's founder, Alfred E. Mann, will step down as chairman and chief executive to devote attention to his other medical start-ups. If approved by shareholders and regulators, the $3.

A workaholic with seemingly inexhaustible energy, Alfred E. Mann regularly puts in 100-hour weeks overseeing his biomedical empire--including construction of a new company headquarters on a 40-acre site at CSUN. Mann, 74, first demonstrated his flair for business in high school, when he took a jewelry course, melted down old silver flatware, fashioned it into jewelry and resold it to classmates.